Verte Medini Residence

It is in Bandar Medini Iskandar, 79100 Iskandar Puteri — inside the Medini zone, the special development area run under the Iskandar Regional Development Authority framework, with Legoland Malaysia, EduCity and Gleneagles Hospital Medini as its neighbours. The CJ Invesco sales gallery is on Persiaran Medini Utara 3 and is open daily from 10am to 6pm.

The project’s marketing puts Singapore at about 15 minutes via the Tuas Second Link and Johor Bahru city centre at 20 to 25 minutes. Those are marketing figures, not measured drive times, and I have labelled them that way on the distance table.

One thing to be clear about: your border crossing here is the Second Link, not the Causeway. The RTS Link station at Bukit Chagar is on the other side of Iskandar Puteri and does very little for this address. Anyone selling you Medini on the RTS story is selling you the wrong story.

Leasehold. What a buyer in Medini receives is a 99-year strata leasehold interest, not a freehold parcel. This is not a grey area and it is not a technicality — it changes what you own, what your bank will lend against it, and what your buyer inherits when you sell.

You will nonetheless see this project described as freehold in several places online. One listing portal page manages to print freehold development in its written description and Leasehold in its property details table on the same page. When a source contradicts itself on the single most important fact about a property, that is your signal to go to the title, not to the portal.

Read the next answer for how the structure actually works, then ask CJ Invesco for the lease commencement and expiry dates on your specific parcel in writing. Do not accept a verbal answer on this.

The chain runs like this. Iskandar Investment Berhad owns the Medini land freehold. IIB grants a 99-year lease out of that freehold — in the scheme examined by the Court of Appeal, the term ran from 15 April 2013 to 14 April 2112, granted to Medini Land Sdn Bhd. A developer takes its position under that lease and sells buyers a 99-year leasehold interest in a strata parcel, under the Iskandar Regional Development Authority’s private lease scheme guidelines together with a Ministry of Housing and Local Government exemption made under Regulation 11(3) of the Housing Development (Control and Licensing) Regulations 1989.

It has been tested. In 2025 the Court of Appeal decided AP Tropika Istimewa Development Sdn Bhd v Wong Hang Fah & 106 Others (Civil Appeal No. W-02(NCvC)(W)-1552-10/2020), a dispute brought by 107 purchasers at a Medini project. The court upheld the private lease scheme, confirmed that issuing strata titles under a long lease does not contravene the National Land Code or the Strata Titles Act, and held that the developer had acted in good faith on validly issued regulatory approvals. So the structure is sound; the buyers who challenged it lost.

The practical consequence is not legal risk, it is time. Your lease is a wasting asset. Ask for the exact commencement and expiry dates on your parcel, because different Medini plots do not all run identical terms. And note one detail from that judgment that applies to Medini SPAs generally: the exemption in that case also permitted a 48-month delivery period instead of the standard 36 months, and the contract was not in the standard Schedule H form. Have your lawyer read your SPA line by line rather than assuming it is the usual document.

Medini has historically been the exception to Johor’s foreign-ownership rules. New strata units bought from a developer inside the Medini zone have been treated as exempt from the Johor minimum purchase price for non-citizens and from the state consent requirement — the Court of Appeal itself noted that the purchasers in the Medini case had benefited from exemptions applicable to Medini, including relaxed foreign ownership rules. That relief is the single biggest reason foreign buyers look at Medini at all.

Here is where I stop and refuse to guess. I have not been able to verify from a current government or IRDA publication exactly what the position is today — specifically, whether the exemption still applies in full in 2026, and whether the Johor foreign buyer levy introduced on 1 July 2025 (3% of price or RM30,000, whichever is higher — and RM50,000, not RM30,000, where the property is a serviced residence transacted below RM1 million, which is precisely the combination a Medini exemption would create) and the flat 8% stamp duty applying to non-citizens since 1 January 2026 apply to a purchase inside Medini. Those two items alone can be a five-figure difference on a modest unit.

So the honest instruction is: get the current position confirmed in writing by CJ Invesco and independently by a Johor conveyancing lawyer before you pay any booking fee, and ask for the written confirmation to name the levy and the stamp duty specifically rather than answering in generalities. I will raise both questions with the developer for you and forward whatever comes back. What I will not do is put a comfortable answer on this page that I cannot stand behind.

Five layouts, and both the developer’s website and the project’s marketing material agree on all five: Type A 935 sq ft (three rooms, dual key), Type B 614 sq ft (two rooms, dual key), Type C 643 sq ft (two rooms, two bathrooms), Type D 819 sq ft (three rooms, two bathrooms) and Type E 861 sq ft (three rooms, two bathrooms, loft duplex). A second drawing is published for the Type E upper level.

Now the disagreement, because you will run into it. EdgeProp’s page for this project lists Type B at 613 sq ft with two bathrooms, Type C at 635 sq ft with one bathroom, and a Type E at 850 sq ft with two bedrooms. Property Genie describes the scheme as four towers starting from 819 sq ft. None of that lines up with the developer’s own material.

I use the developer’s figures on this page and flag the rest. When you get to the sale and purchase agreement, the only area that has ever mattered is the one written into it, in square metres, with the strata plan attached. Check it there.

The developer has not published a unit count, a block count, a storey count or a completion date. Neither has it published a developer licence number or an advertising and sales permit number on the project website — which for a Malaysian residential development is the disclosure you would normally expect to find in the footer.

A listing portal shows 1,106 total units and a 2029 completion, and another describes four towers. I have not been able to confirm any of that against a developer publication, so those numbers appear on this page only as unconfirmed portal figures, clearly marked, and nowhere in the headline facts.

This matters more than it might sound. The unit count tells you how many identical neighbours you will be competing with on resale and on rent, the storey count tells you whether your floor is high or low in the stack, and the completion date is the one your loan drawdown schedule runs off. I will ask CJ Invesco for all four in writing, along with the licence and permit numbers, and send you exactly what they send me.

CJ Invesco has not published a price list or a maintenance rate. A listing portal shows a headline figure of around RM379,000 as a starting price; I have not been able to match that against a developer price list, so treat it as an indication of the price band rather than as a quote, and do not budget off it.

That figure does illustrate one real point, though. A starting price in that range sits far below the RM1,000,000 floor that applies to non-citizens elsewhere in Johor, which is exactly why the Medini exemption question in the FAQ above is the first thing a foreign buyer here has to settle. If the exemption applies to you, the entry cost is in a completely different league from a JB city-centre unit. If it does not, the arithmetic collapses.

The maintenance rate is the number nobody asks about and everybody pays for. On a leasehold strata scheme with a shuttle bus in the marketing, I want to know the rate per square foot, the sinking fund contribution, who is committed to funding the shuttle and for how long. Message me and I will get the current price list and those figures direct from the developer, in writing.

It means you should buy here for the tenant, not for the story. NAPIC’s Q3 2025 data put Johor’s completed unsold serviced apartments at roughly 9,000 units, the highest of any state and more than half the national total at the time. By Q1 2026 the national figure for completed unsold serviced apartments had risen to about 19,000 units, worth roughly RM16.5 billion. A large share of that overhang was built in the Iskandar corridor during the last boom, and Medini took its share of it.

The three things that actually bite. Resale liquidity: in a district with visible unsold stock, your buyer has alternatives, several of them still on a developer’s book with rebates and furniture packages an individual seller cannot match — expect a longer marketing period and a softer price. Rent: high standing supply caps the rent you can ask; the difference between a full year let and two vacant months is bigger than the difference between two asking rents. Bank valuation: valuers price off recent comparable transactions, and in an oversupplied district weak comparables can bring a valuation in below your purchase price, with the shortfall payable by you in cash at drawdown. On a leasehold parcel, add the lease residue to what the valuer is weighing.

What is genuinely different about Medini: the demand here is institutional rather than commuter. EduCity’s universities and international schools, Gleneagles Medini and the businesses around Legoland produce tenants on fixed terms who are not affected by what happens at the Causeway. That is a more durable tenant base than a city-centre tower betting on the RTS — but it is also a smaller one. Ask me for the current rental listings and vacancy picture in Medini specifically before you commit; district-level averages will mislead you here.

Usually yes, but with two layers of reduction rather than one. Non-citizens are generally looking at around 60% to 70% loan-to-value against up to 90% for a citizen. On top of that, banks price leasehold differently from freehold: the residue of the lease at the end of your loan term is part of their calculation, and the shorter it gets, the tighter the tenure and margin they will offer.

Do the arithmetic before you fall in love with a unit. If the head lease runs to 2112 and you buy in 2026 with a 30-year loan, the lease still has a long residue at the end of the term — that is comfortable. The person who buys from you in 2050, borrowing over 30 years to 2080, is looking at a very different picture. That is not a reason to avoid Medini; it is a reason to understand that your exit price is partly a function of the calendar.

Practical advice: get an offer in principle from at least two banks before you commit, ask each of them explicitly how they treat a Medini private lease scheme parcel, and ask the valuation basis up front. And have your lawyer confirm the parcel’s exact lease dates — the residue is the input everything else depends on.